Why big business wants you back in the office full-time
Another wave of return-to-office orders made headlines recently. Large technology and media companies, including Microsoft, Paramount and Comcast have joined firms such as Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, Nike, and even the US federal government in announcing policies limiting employees’ opportunities to work remotely. This is not solely an American phenomenon: major Irish banks, including Bank of Ireland and AIB, have announced back-to-the-office mandates, some of which have received strong pushback from unions.
Executives who announce back-to-the-office policies routinely cite the idea that in-person work is critical for innovation, collaboration, teamwork or creativity. There is some evidence that in-person work leads to more cross-functional collaboration, but the evidence that this leads to beneficial outcomes is weak. In fact, when executives make claims about the benefits of this policy, I think it’s fair to ask the question, memorably asked in the classic commercial for the fast food company Wendy’s, “where’s the beef?”.
We know a fair amount about the consequences of return-to-the-office policies, and little of what we know suggests that they are beneficial. Workers appear to be more productive working from home or other remote settings than they are in the office. They are more satisfied when working remotely and remote workers are less likely to quit.
The idea that organisations are better off if they force employees to come back to the office seems almost laughable. If you accept the idea that these policies are not likely to lead to a happier, more productive workforce, or at least that the gains associated with return-to-the-office are not as large as the costs, what is driving these policies?
In previous columns, I have argued that factors ranging from the simple force of habit to the embarrassment of sitting in a largely empty office building often push executives to push employees to return to the office. But over time, patterns have started to emerge in back-to-the-office policies that suggest a simpler, but perhaps more sinister explanation. Return to the office policies are considerably more likely to be implemented in large organisations than in smaller ones, and executives in large organisations share several characteristics that might be related to their embrace of this strategy.
First, return-to-the-office mandates appear to be exercises in power and control rather than being sincere attempts to improve organisations. Top executives in large organisations are immensely powerful and their power is growing as employment markets are tightening. The explanation for back-to-the-office mandates may be as simple as they do it because they can.
A less sinister explanation for the increase in these mandates in large rather than smaller companies is that the top executives in large firms are more remote from their employees and that their formative experiences were often in large organisations where everyone worked in traditional organisations. CEOs of small organisations are often founders or individuals who once worked more closely with employees, whereas the route to the top of large organisations often involves a steady climb through the rungs of management, where the executive becomes increasingly removed from the experience of regular employees at each step.
Working in a traditional office is what many top executives are thoroughly used to, and they may find it difficult to understand why so many employees want to work remotely. After all, one of the things that got them to the top was their ability to manage office politics and to survive in teams where not everyone pulls their weight. Believe it or not, some of the aspects of returning to the office that most of us hate (meetings, office politics, teamwork) might be mother’s milk to successful executives.
The bad news about return-to-the-office orders is that they will make the working lives of many employees more depressing and less productive. The good news is that this trend is largely limited to large corporate employers. More than 99% of Irish workplaces are classified as small to medium employers (SMEs) and more than two thirds of Irish employees work in these SMEs. While headlines about return-to-the-office mandates in large organizations can be depressing, they are not relevant to the large majority of the Irish workforce.
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